Build a committee to oppose Oakland school cuts! For a socialist program to expand public education!
By
the Socialist Equality Party (US)
16 December 2017
The Oakland Board of Education will vote tonight on whether to approve millions in mid-year budget cuts to the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), which serves 50,119 students. The board, which is intimately connected to the Democratic Party and wealthy proponents of school privatization, is deliberately starving the public school system of resources so it can use the crisis it manufactured to close “failing schools” and replace them with for-profit charter operations.
This is evidenced by the fact that the current budget cuts include $4.2 million from the 87 district-run public schools and not a penny in cuts for the 35 district-authorized charter schools.
The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and the International Youth and Student for Social Equality (IYSSE) urges school workers, parents, students and everyone else who opposes these cuts to form an emergency committee to defend the right to high-quality public education. The entire working class in Oakland and across the Bay Area must be mobilized to stop this criminal attack, which is aimed at stripping working-class youth of an education and condemning them to a future of poverty and war.
Last week hundreds came to the board meeting to denounce the planned cuts. But appeals to the board, which answers to the corporate enemies of public education, is an exercise in futility. Instead all those who defend the schools must turn for support to the working class—city workers fighting wage and benefit cuts, workers opposed to outrageous housing costs, young people fighting student loan debts, immigrant workers angered over deportation threats. All of these forces…